The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 6

The night Kane married her, I was on my knees in the east room, and not for grief.

The twins came early and they came hard, in the black hours of a spring storm, and the first thing I want recorded is that I was an insufferable patient. Ask anyone. Ask Mara, the camp midwife, who at one point put a wooden spoon in my hand and said if you diagnose your own labor one more time I will let you deliver them yourself.

"The second one's transverse," I said. "I can feel the lie of it. You'll need to turn it or—"

"Or nothing. Push when I say and doctor never."

Iron stood at the door with her spear, facing out, on the theory that anything the storm brought tonight would have to explain itself to her first. Beyond her, in the rain, the whole camp was awake and pretending not to be. Rogues don't gather for a birth. They'd gathered.

And somewhere out there in the dark, at the exact distance a man stands when he refuses to admit he is standing anywhere at all, was Caspian.

He'd been in the doorway at dusk when the first wave took my breath. He hadn't asked anything. He'd looked at me, and looked at Mara, and gone out into the rain, and Iron told me later he did not move from that spot for nine hours. Kings don't pace. He just stood, hood down, letting the storm work, like a man keeping a watch he'd been assigned by someone he couldn't refuse.

Between waves I did inventories. Clean linen. Boiled thread. Two heartbeats, still doubled, still stubborn.

Two hundred miles south, they'd be lighting the hall candles about now.

I knew the order of a Blackridge wedding the way I knew bones. The procession. The binding vows at moonrise. The wine. I'd played it in my head all winter whether I wanted it played or not, and here is the truth I'd never have said aloud: I'd expected tonight to hurt in the old way, the marble-floor way.

It didn't. The waves came and the storm leaned on the walls and my body did the oldest work there is, and Blackridge felt like a story about a country I used to live in.

Then the hard part started, and even Mara stopped talking.

***

At moonrise, in the great hall of Blackridge, Kane took his vows with five hundred witnesses and could not taste the ceremonial wine.

Salt, he told himself, was for food. Wine was different. The wine was simply poor, an off cask, someone would answer for it, and he set down the cup and took Ravenna's hands and began the binding words his father had spoken before him, under his father's portrait, in his father's hall.

He was word-perfect. He'd rehearsed.

***

"Stop pushing," Mara said. "Stop. Breathe. The first one's coming wrong side to and I need my hands and your stillness, healer, so for once in your life—"

I was still. I was nothing but still. The storm and the fire and Iron's shape at the door all narrowed to one burning point of now, and my gift, which I had held down for nine hours because a healer's gold light pouring over her own labor is a beacon you can read for miles, slipped its leash.

Gold ran down my arms like water. Mara worked in its light and swore steadily, a sound I held onto like a rope, and the east room glowed through the storm, and out in the rain forty rogues saw the light come off the birthing house like a low second moon and not one of them looked away.

My daughter was born furious. She came into the world mid-scream, ahead of her brother, gripping a fistful of the storm, red-faced, alive, so loudly alive that Iron turned from the door with an expression I never saw on her before or since.

Mara laughed, the good rough laugh of a midwife with one safe in her hands. "Well. This one's yours all right."

Nell. I'd carried the name all winter. Little light.

Then came her brother, and the room changed.

He was born silent.

I know silence. Silence is my trade. There is the silence of nothing wrong and there is the other one, and nine hours of discipline broke in me in half a second flat. I was reaching for him, gold flaring, every dead-cord and still-lung remedy of my grandmother's line already moving through my hands—

"He breathes," Mara said. Sharp. Wondering. "Healer. Look. He breathes fine."

He did. Chest rising, steady, pink. My son lay in the midwife's hands in the gold light, eyes open, and he was not crying because he was doing something else.

He was listening.

To the storm. To Iron's breathing. To his sister. To me. Eyes open on his first minute of the world, moving from sound to sound, unhurried, like a small judge hearing testimony. I have delivered many children. Newborns do not do this.

"Give him here," I whispered.

And my son, passing from her hands to mine, made his first sound. Not a wail. One short cry, a single note, almost a word, pitched low.

Mara's knees hit the floor.

She didn't decide to kneel. I watched it happen to her, watched her own body fold the way bodies answer an Alpha's command voice, instinct older than law, and outside the door I heard it travel: the storm-soaked camp going down, one after another, forty wolves kneeling in the rain to a sound they'd heard once through a wall.

A command voice. Hours old. The gift of ruling Alphas, of Alpha blood, undeniable, unfakeable, proof you could take to any tribunal on the continent.

Mara looked up at me from the floor, white to the lips.

"Whose pup," she whispered, "is this?"

I held him against me, his sister already asleep in the crook of my other arm, his eyes finding my face and staying there, listening to my heart like it was the last testimony of the night.

"Mine," I said.

***

At moonrise exactly, mid-vow, the Alpha of Blackridge faltered.

One word, lost. He never lost words. A strange doubled flutter had gone through his chest, quick, like a second heartbeat laid over his own, there and gone, and with it came a pain behind his ribs so pure and specific it had a temperature.

Warmth from his nose. He touched it. Blood, bright on his fingers, in front of five hundred guests.

Ravenna's hand was already there with a white cloth, smooth as choreography, her body angled to shield him from the hall, her smile turning it into nothing, grooms and nerves, drink your wine. She finished the moment so gracefully that half the hall never saw it.

But she had seen it. And Ravenna of Silver Moon, who was never wrong about a threat, who had read the old accounts in her father's library including the pages about what a broken true-bond does to the breaker, looked at the blood on the cloth in her hand and understood the arithmetic of her marriage before the vows that made it were even finished.

She said nothing. She folded the cloth away, and took her husband's hands, and smiled for the witnesses.

Family looks after family.

***

In the east room, in the last of the gold light, Caspian finally came in from the rain.

Nine hours of storm ran off him and he seemed not to know it. He stopped just inside the door, hood back, and looked at the three of us for a long time, and I watched the dead king take a full breath like a man surfacing.

"The camp is kneeling in the mud," he said. "You've ruined discipline for a generation."

"Blame him." I turned my son so the silver eyes and the small listening face regarded each other. "He started it."

Caspian crossed the room. He looked down at Nell, asleep and ferocious even at it, and something in his face went quiet and young. Then at the boy, who studied him back with that unhurried attention, sound by sound, and the king and the newborn took each other's measure in the firelight while the storm died.

"He has an Alpha's voice," Caspian said. "You know what that proves. And you know who'll come looking once word of it walks. Words always walk."

"I know."

"Then know this too." He crouched, so his eyes were level with my son's, and made him a promise in a low, even voice: the first vow either of my children ever received. "No tribunal, no pack, no father claims you while I breathe. And I have already proven," said the dead king, "how difficult I am to stop breathing."